Excerpt

Annie Gets Her Shot

Four of the most memorable Annie Leibovitz shots—of Mick Jagger, Demi Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Queen Elizabeth II—gain added power from the stories behind them, shedding as much light on Leibovitz’s portrait-making process as on her subjects. In an excerpt from her new book, the photographer describes those experiences at the intersection of art and celebrity, from nearly losing herself in the Rolling Stones’ world to touching off an ironic scandal with her Buckingham Palace session.

Arnold Newman said that photography is one percent talent and ninety-nine percent moving furniture. I think about that sometimes when we’re on location and we’ve moved the set—the stage, the lights, the backdrop, sandbags, fans. And moved them again. And again. I just have to close my eyes to everything that’s being done. The manual labor is daunting.

It didn’t start out that way. In the beginning, I traveled alone. I carried my equipment and if I used a light I would set it up myself. Some people took the results as a style. A writer for American Photographer once said that the umbrella and strobe reflected in the mirror in my portrait of Jimmy Carter was a “skillfully implemented device.” As I recall, I walked into the room holding the light and set it down and plugged it in and started taking pictures. I didn’t think about it.

I first worked with an assistant in 1975, during the Rolling Stones tour. I wanted to photograph the band together right after the show, when they were pumped up, and I had been talking to them about this for weeks. I told them how fantastic they looked all sweaty, but I could never get them to stop for the photograph. So one night in Los Angeles I hired an assistant who helped me hang a roll of seamless paper and set up a strobe outside the stage door. They had to walk across the paper to get to their cars. When they saw it they laughed and stopped and I got four or five frames.

If I borrowed someone’s studio, there would usually be an assistant there to help out, but I didn’t have my own assistants on a regular basis until the magazine I worked for, Rolling Stone, moved its offices from California to New York, in 1977. I didn’t hire someone full-time until I had my first studio, in 1981, and I found the new arrangement frustrating. The assistant didn’t automatically see what I saw. Everyone sees things differently, and he often didn’t know what to do even if he was standing next to me. I had watched Dick Avedon work and I didn’t understand why it couldn’t be like that. Avedon didn’t have to tell his assistant where to move the light. It seemed to be done by osmosis. That came from working together for many years. Reluctantly, I had to learn to talk about the shoot before it happened, which didn’t seem right. It took away the mystery.

Mick Jagger, Buffalo, New York, 1975. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

The job description for an assistant is pretty loose. Over time, assistants have taken on roles I couldn’t have envisioned when I started working. My assistants used to check out new equipment and work on lighting problems in the studio. Our last studio was in an old double garage in Chelsea. It was vast, with high ceilings. It was the studio of my dreams, but I realized that I didn’t need it. My best pictures are taken on location. Anyway, the studio got too big. We had too much equipment. Things were getting out of hand. Having a studio is a little like having a fancy car. It doesn’t help you take better pictures. Now I have an office in a town house in the West Village. The assistants have a room where we keep just enough equipment for a small portrait shoot. There is an area for meetings. My studio manager and the archivists have spaces. Postproduction work on the pictures is done in a design room that has several computer stations. There are a number of fully equipped photo studios in the neighborhood that we can rent. And we can set up a portable studio anywhere if we need to.

Mick Jagger

When I first worked for Rolling Stone, in the early 70s, we wouldn’t photograph a band until they came to town. I hardly ever traveled. I took some pictures of the Rolling Stones when they came through San Francisco in 1971 and 1972. Truman Capote was supposed to write a story for the magazine about the 1972 tour, and the editor, Jann Wenner, said it was O.K. if I went along to two or three cities. Robert Frank was traveling with the band, making a 16-mm. film that would become Cocksucker Blues. The band had commissioned him to do it, but it was never formally released, presumably because of the drugs and sex that were filmed. Danny Seymour, Frank’s friend and camera assistant, was involved in a lot of that. He died mysteriously while the film was being edited.

I was in awe of Robert Frank. He had been one of my heroes when I was a photography student at the San Francisco Art Institute. I couldn’t believe that I was able to watch him work for a few days, that I was actually in the room where Robert Frank was loading his camera. He picked up my camera once. I was terrified. He held it. It was like being with God. He said to me, “You can’t get every picture.” That was comforting advice. You do miss things. You’re attached to this machine. To its timing. Things are moving in front of you and you’re supposed to capture them, but it’s not always possible. Robert Frank didn’t seem to be missing anything, though. He was tireless. He never stopped working.

I guess the band liked the few pictures I took then, and in 1975 Mick called and asked me if I would like to be their tour photographer. Mick is very shrewd. He seems to understand that the documentation of the band is important. He kept all of his costumes from the tours. And he’s always had a photographer. Like the president or the Queen has a photographer.

I went to Jann and told him I wanted to go on the tour. He said that he couldn’t guarantee that there would be a job for me when I came back, but I thought it was too good an opportunity to miss. Robert Frank had photographed the Rolling Stones and now it was my turn.

The band was rehearsing at Andy Warhol’s place in Montauk, at the end of Long Island, and I went out there for a month or so, and then there was a break and the tour started in June. I was very naïve. I brought my tennis racket with me. I thought that maybe as we went from city to city I would take tennis lessons. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. They were paying me a few hundred dollars a week and I was supposed to create publicity pictures, but I only managed to get a few out the first day and that was it. I was never up during the day again. I was always with the band.

At the time, I thought that the way to get the best work was to become a chameleon. To become so much a part of what was going on that no one would notice you were there. It was unbelievably stupid of me to pick that situation to become part of. I did everything you’re supposed to do when you go on tour with the Rolling Stones. It was the first time in my life that something took me over.

A rock ‘n’ roll tour is unnatural. You’re moving through time and space too fast. The experience is extreme. There is the bigness of the performances and then the isolation and loneliness that follows. The band was like a group of lost boys, but their music saved them. It gave them a reason to exist. When they weren’t on tour they didn’t spend that much time together. On the road they worked. It was the first time in my life—and I’d been at Rolling Stone for five years by then—that I saw how music is made. I saw how it is produced organically. The riffs I heard in hotel rooms during the tour were the songs on the next album—“Memory Motel,” “Fool to Cry.”

The photograph that is emblematic of the 1975 tour for me is the one of Mick in the elevator. It was toward the end of the tour, and he was not on the ground. He was flying. From another world. He was the most beautiful object. Like a butterfly. Ethereal. After all the time on the road, his dancing was very loose. It was almost surreal. I was always aware of where Mick was. What might have seemed like a nuisance to him became a source of comfort. To know that I was somewhere nearby. It was a subject-photographer relationship of an obsessive kind. I remember him saying that I should tell him if I wanted him to be at a specific place on the stage at any point in the show, but I found that too daunting. I couldn’t think of anything for him to do that he wasn’t already doing.

At the end of the performances, the band would do two or three encores that had been planned. Nothing was ad-libbed. They were professional in a way I hadn’t seen until then. They’d been doing it awhile. After the last encore, when everyone in the audience thought they were coming onstage again, they would get out of Dodge. Mick dumped several pails of water on his head every night as part of the show and he would leave the stage totally wet, with his eye makeup running. He wrapped himself up in towels and jumped in the car. Usually the band went straight to the plane, but we were staying in town the night I photographed him in the elevator. The picture was taken on the way up to Mick’s room. He and I were alone. We were on some level out of it. Not because of drugs, but because of all that travel, and sleep deprivation, and the exertion of the performances.

I learned about power on that tour. About how people in an audience can lose a sense of themselves and melt into a frenzied, mindless mass. Mick and Keith had tremendous power both on and offstage. They would walk into a room like young gods. I found that my proximity to them lent me power also. A new kind of status. It didn’t have anything to do with my work. It was power by association.

I’ve been on many tour buses and at many concerts, but the best photographs I’ve made of musicians at work were done during that Rolling Stones tour. I probably spent more time on it than on any other subject. For me, the story about the pictures is about almost losing myself, and coming back, and what it means to be deeply involved in a subject. You can get amazing work, but you’ve got to be careful. The thing that saved me was that I had my camera by my side. It was there to remind me who I was and what I did. It separated me from them.

It’s hard to imagine now, but the portrait of Demi Moore nude and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair was truly scandalous in 1991. Scandalous in the sense of shocking and morally offensive to some people. The first day the issue was available, it sold out on newsstands at Grand Central Station during the morning rush hour. Newsstands in other parts of the country displayed it in a white paper wrapper, as if it were a porn magazine. Several supermarket chains refused to sell it even with the wrapper. Television crews were parked outside the Vanity Fair office for days. Editorialists and pundits weighed in. A few years later, the picture was held responsible for the rise of body-hugging maternity fashions.

None of this was my intention, although it’s gratifying to think that the picture helped make pregnant women feel less awkward or embarrassed about their bodies. It began as a shoot with a specific problem. Demi had a new movie coming out, and Tina Brown, who was the editor of the magazine then, wanted to put her on the cover, but Demi was seven months pregnant with her second child. Tina and I talked about how to handle this, and we decided to go for a glamorous, sexy look. Lori Goldstein, the stylist, brought diamond earrings and a 30-carat-diamond ring to the studio in Los Angeles where we were shooting. We had long gowns, including a green satin robe by Isaac Mizrahi.

Demi and I had worked together several times before, and I’d taken her wedding pictures when she married Bruce Willis, in 1987. I had said to her then that I was interested in photographing a pregnant woman, which at that point I never had. Demi called me when she was going to have their first child. Bruce was working on location in Kentucky and she had gone there to have the baby. I stopped off in Kentucky on the way back to New York from Los Angeles and took a few rolls of black-and-white film. Just for them. Demi and Bruce were not shy about documenting the pregnancy. Several friends and a man with three video cameras were in the room when their daughter was born a few weeks later.

At the cover sitting in 1991, I shot a few close-ups and some full-length portraits. Demi was by no means camouflaged for any of them. In the standing portrait published inside the magazine the green satin robe is pulled off her shoulders and it falls open to expose her belly and leg. In another picture she’s wearing a black lace bra and panties. But the fully nude picture was not taken until toward the end of the shoot and was intended just for Demi. I was taking some companion photographs to the ones I had made during Demi’s first pregnancy. As I was shooting, I said, “You know, this would be a great cover.” It wasn’t until I got back to New York and looked at the proofs that I realized that there really was a great cover photograph there. Tina agreed, although she thought that Demi would be furious if we ran it. She was surprised when Demi said yes right away. We all knew what we were doing up to a point, but none of us completely understood the ramifications.

A few months after the Demi Moore picture was published, an exhibition of my work from 1970 to 1990 opened at the International Center of Photography, in New York. The director of the center, Cornell Capa, wanted to blow the picture up and hang it in the stairwell. I wouldn’t let him. It was a popular picture and it broke ground, but I don’t think it’s a good photograph per se. It’s a magazine cover. If it were a great portrait, she wouldn’t be covering her breasts. She wouldn’t necessarily be looking at the camera. There are different criteria for magazine covers. They’re simple. The addition of type doesn’t destroy them. Sometimes they even need type. My best photographs are inside the magazine.

I first worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1975, when he was competing in the Mr. Olympia bodybuilding contest in South Africa. Arnold was 28. He’d already been Mr. Olympia five times and he was about to retire from bodybuilding. He wanted to get into films. The 1975 Mr. Olympia contest was the basis for George Butler’s documentary Pumping Iron, the movie that popularized bodybuilding and introduced Arnold to a wider audience. Butler was a friend of Jann Wenner’s. I don’t remember exactly, but I assume that my trip to South Africa was what is now known as a press junket. I can’t imagine that Rolling Stone would have paid for it. I do remember that Butler was always filming when I was trying to work.

Arnold is the center of Pumping Iron in every way. In terms of the narrative of the preparation for the contest, he is the guy everybody else has to beat, which they pretty much know they can’t. As a character, he is aggressively, if charmingly, self-confident. Witty. Intelligent. Full of himself. He somehow makes what is a rather freakish scene seem almost normal, although it never seemed normal to me. Steroids were legal then. I had just spent several weeks on tour with the Rolling Stones, where Mick Jagger was the male sexual ideal. Being around all those super-pumped-up guys made me feel like Diane Arbus. It didn’t help that we were in South Africa, which still had apartheid. There were separate bathrooms for blacks and whites. It was an uncomfortable situation.

Arnold was sharing a room with his friend Franco Columbu, who came in second in the final posedown. Arnold and Franco were very competitive and brotherly and I decided that I wanted to photograph them in bed. I had in mind something that was, in retrospect, along the lines of Bruce Weber. The magazine used one of the photographs of them horsing around. Standing on their heads on their pillows. It was more silly than erotic. They had their underpants on for that shot, but Arnold was also walking around naked that morning. Like most models or athletes who love their bodies, Arnold didn’t mind being naked.

Two years later, when I had to photograph Dolly Parton and needed an interesting background, I asked Arnold to pose with her. She was a much bigger star than he was. Most people had never heard of him then. I was thinking of chopping off his head in the frame, but it became a moot point because Dolly kept standing in front of him and blocking him out of the picture. In the portrait, all you can see of him are his flexed arms and legs. He’s furniture.

In Pumping Iron, Arnold says, “I was always dreaming about very powerful people, dictators and things like that. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years, or even, like Jesus, being, for thousands of years, remembered.” Ten years later he was the Terminator. I shot him for the Vanity Fair Hall of Fame in 1988. We were shooting on the beach, and he said he had a horse, and I said, Well, bring it along, not thinking much about it. I couldn’t believe it when the horse showed up. It looked like Arnold. Arnold’s thigh in those white pants looks like the horse’s thigh. It was not a picture that I liked right away, because it is primarily about form and I’m reluctant to have form impose the meaning on a picture. But in Arnold’s case, form is also content.

In 2007, a few weeks before Queen Elizabeth visited the United States for the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, I was asked to take her portrait. I was the first American to be asked by the Palace to make an official portrait of the Queen, which was very flattering. I felt honored. I also felt that because I was an American I had an advantage over every other photographer or painter who had made a portrait of her. It was O.K. for me to be reverent. The British are conflicted about what they think of the monarch. If a British portraitist is reverent, he’s perceived to be doting. I could do something traditional.

It’s ironic that the sitting with the Queen became controversial. I’m rather proud of having been in control of a complicated shoot. The controversy arose about two months after the pictures were published, when the BBC claimed that the Queen had walked out while we were shooting. This was completely untrue, and although they retracted the claim and issued an apology to the Queen and to me almost immediately, the scandal had a life of its own. The story, which came to be referred to as Queengate, wouldn’t die. Eventually the head of BBC One resigned over it.

When I was preparing for the shoot, I thought about using the landscape around Balmoral Castle, in Scotland. I brought this up in the very first conference call with the Palace. I said that Americans thought of the Queen as an outdoorswoman. I had been influenced by Helen Mirren’s performance in The Queen and I couldn’t help mentioning how much I liked her character in that film. There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

The second idea I had, after Balmoral, was to photograph the Queen on horseback. I asked where she rode and they said she went riding every Saturday at Windsor Castle. I said that I would love to see her in her riding clothes, and in a later conversation I asked if she could stop during her weekend ride and get off her horse and mount it again. That is, could I do a portrait of her in the trees. They said, No, it was not possible. She just rode the horse and came back, and, anyway, she didn’t wear riding clothes anymore. A few days later they said it was going to be Buckingham Palace and no horses.

I realized that I was going to need some time on the ground for this. When we arrived in London, we went straight to the palace and were shown all the rooms, including the throne room—everywhere except the private quarters. And then we scouted the back. There was a wintery sky and the trees didn’t have leaves. It was an appropriate mood for this moment in the Queen’s life. There was no way, however, that she was going to stand outside in formal attire.

For a sitting like this you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You try to have as many options as possible. I kept thinking that somehow I would get the Queen outside, but I began choosing formal outfits. I narrowed the robes down to a very handsome Order of the Garter cape, but then we were told that she could wear only a white dress under it. We were lobbying for a gold dress. I was also hoping for a dress with more body to it. The Queen wears very streamlined dresses now that she’s older, and I wanted her in something with more volume. But she didn’t have anything like that. Finally everyone agreed that she could wear a gold-and-white dress under the Order of the Garter robe. The Queen was 80 years old. She was sturdy, but putting on and taking off a lot of heavy clothes is tiring, and she had to be dressed in layers to expedite things. The gold-white dress became the base.

I was still upset that I couldn’t get her outside. It was so beautiful out there. And it wasn’t cold or raining or anything. I began thinking about what Cecil Beaton had done. He brought in flowered backdrops. Beaton was big on backdrops. He made very stagy portraits. Perhaps because the pictures were made in black and white you don’t notice the backdrops. They sort of go out of focus. I realized that I could do something similar digitally. I decided to photograph the garden and the trees for a backdrop.

The Palace had given us 25 minutes with the Queen, so there had to be a battle plan. I chose a grand reception room, the White Drawing Room, as the principal setting because of the light from the tall windows. Supplementary lights had been pre-set so that when the Queen moved from one spot to another all we needed to do was switch them on. We had constructed a gray canvas backdrop in an anteroom, and she was to come in there wearing the Order of the Garter robe and the dress, but no tiara. The first shot was to be made on a balcony, with the sky behind her. That sky could be digitally exchanged later for the pictures I had taken in the gardens the day before. I didn’t want her to be wearing a tiara in the gardens.

The morning of the shoot, the Queen came walking down the hall very purposefully. She was definitely a force. This was all being taped by the BBC for a documentary. I would never have agreed to their being there if I felt I had any choice, but they had been following her around for months. Their microphone picked up her saying, “I’ve had enough of dressing like this, thank you very much,” as she marched down the hall. Later, when segments of footage for the BBC were edited for a promotional film, it appeared as if the Queen were stomping out of the photo session rather than going into it. Thus the brouhaha.

The Queen was about 20 minutes late, which we thought was a little strange. When that happens, you never know if it can be made up on the other end. My five-year-old daughter, Sarah, had come with us, and she curtsied and offered the Queen flowers, and I introduced my team. At this point I was in shock. The Queen had the tiara on. That was not the plan. It was supposed to be added later. The dresser knew that. The Queen started saying, “I don’t have much time. I don’t have much time,” and I took her to the first setup and showed her the pictures of the gardens. I think she understood what we had in mind. Then I walked her into the drawing room, probably sooner than I would have if things had been going well. She composed herself when I took some pictures.

I knew how tight everything was, especially with the loss of 20 minutes, and I asked the Queen if she would remove the tiara. (I used the word “crown,” which was a faux pas.) I suggested that a less dressy look might be better. And she said, “Less dressy! What do you think this is?” I thought she was being funny. English humor. But I noticed that the dresser and everyone else who had been working with her were staying about 20 feet away from her.

We removed the big robe, and I took the picture of the Queen looking out the window, and then I said, Listen, I was a little thrown when you first came in, and I have one more picture I’d like to try, with an admiral’s boat cloak. I was thinking of one of Cecil Beaton’s last pictures of the Queen. A very stark and simple and strong portrait in which she’s wearing a boat cloak. We went back into the anteroom, where the gray canvas backdrop had been set up, and she took off the tiara and put on the cloak. That’s the shot we digitally imposed on pictures of the garden.

Right after we finished, I went up to the press secretary and said how much I loved the Queen. How feisty she was. Later I mentioned to a couple of friends that she had been a bit cranky, but it was nothing unusual. What was remarkable about the shoot, and I wrote the Queen a note about this later, was something the BBC missed: her resolve, her devotion to duty. She stayed until I said it was over. Until I said, “Thank you.” We were finished a little before our allotted 25 minutes were up.

Annie LeibovitzAnnie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut.

Exhibitions of her photographs have appeared at museums and galleries all over the world, including the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; the International Center of Photography in New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris; the National Portrait Gallery in London; and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Leibovitz has been designated a Living Legend by the Library of Congress and is the recipient of many other honors, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Center of Photography, the Centenary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in London, and the Wexner Prize. She has been decorated a Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Leibovitz lives in New York with her three children, Sarah, Susan, and Samuelle.